Monday, May 16, 2011

I’ve just finished reading The Lacquer Lady by F Tennyson Jesse (first published in 1929). The novel is set in Mandalay in the 1880s and charts the fall of the Burmese royal dynasty and the annexation of Lower Burma by England. Jesse visited Burma in the 1920s, where she learned about the downfall of the kingdom and something of the people involved in those events. The book is beautifully written, and a profound study of passion and politics. There’s much in it that’s ripe for discussion, but one of the things that struck a particular chord with me was the way in which the Buddha and his followers are described.

In Jesse’s book the Burmese in general, and the Burmese royal family in particular, are characterized as children: “a nursery of vicious children…playing with toy soldiers, but with real lives, had become so vicious that the grown-ups had to step in and take charge”. The grown-ups are, of course, the British with their “bloodless conquest”. The Buddhists’ “religion of pessimism and humility” is juxtaposed with the “muscular” Christianity of the British missionaries. Buddhism is “a selfish creed. The good Samaritan might have passed on with a reflection on the transitoriness of human happiness had he been a follower of Gautama”. Their kindness is passive, not active and in fact leads to cruelty: injured animals are left to die in agony because “Buddhism forbade the merciful taking of their tortured lives”. On the other hand, it has “high ideals”. The Buddhists are not idolaters: they do not worship the Buddha and the images of him are only “to help the devout mind to concentrate on the idea of the Buddha, the just man made perfect.” But while the Buddha is “the just man made perfect” he is in Nirvana “wrapped away from the cries of suffering mortals”.

The depiction of the Buddha in British fiction is a subject that has interested me for many years, and in particular in what I call “early encounter” fiction, that is Victorian/Edwardian. Though there are earlier references (for example in Marco Polo or Daniel Defoe’s work), widespread interest in the Buddha coincided with the British occupation of India. It was the builders of Empire, the traders, explorers, soldiers and administrators, who brought back the first tales of the East; and the writers and artists who followed in their wake who translated these new experiences into art.

Indeed, the Buddha found his way into best-selling fiction. Mark M Hennelly has suggested that in The Moonstone Wilkie Collins uses the stolen gem to make a connection with The Diamond Sutra and oppose “Indian and Hindu transcendental values” against “the more materialistic and rational Victorian temper”. Mary Braddon, another sensation novelist, in her three-volume Vixen introduced the incomparable Miss Skipwith who is writing a book about the Buddha. This is “a tremendous manuscript on blue foolscap, a work whose outward semblance would have been enough to frighten and deter any publisher in his right mind”.

Grant Allen’s 1899 novel Hilda Wade: A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose tells the tale of a group of British tourists in the Himalayas. Their Buddhist guide – villainous, sullen, furtive, scowling, shifty, cruel, sensuous and a half-caste into the bargain – leads them into Tibet to betray them to “Buddhist inquisitors”. Since “No Eulopean” is allowed into Tibet, these “Tibetan fanatics” sentence them to death. Luckily Miss Wade has studied Buddhism and despite some misgiving about idolatry her companions save themselves by following her lead and joining in the lamas’ “half magical ceremonies”: knocking their heads ostentatiously in the dust, “doing poojah, before the ever-smiling Buddha” and, since they don’t know any mantras, making up their own: “Hokey - pokey –winky - wum”. Having thus persuaded the Tibetan monks that they are Buddhists, their lives are spared.

From what I’ve read so far it seems there is reason to think that the earliest references to Buddhism in British literature betray, at best, fascination with the exotic and, at worse, hostility. There may have been a shift to a more sympathetic portrayal by the end of the nineteenth century, marked by works like The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold – which I’ll be looking at in Books and the Buddha Part 2.

Monday, May 2, 2011

In April 2011 literary agent Carole Blake tweeted a link to a blog by US agent Josh Gertler about authors waiting to hear from publishers. The piece was on the deliciously named “Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room” blog – to read it see http://tinyurl.com/3nm8qxx. (Carole Blake’s tweet was on 21 April – a very long time ago in Twitterland.)

Josh Gertler’s piece (“No News”) was a lively – and ultimately reassuring – treatment of the agony of waiting to hear from publishers and agents. The waiting is, as Mr Gertler says, “excruciating”. Of course, whether you’re a writer or not waiting is never fun, as anyone who’s ever sat an exam or applied for a job knows. In publishing, though, there’s an extra dimension of awfulness in that you don’t know when you’re going to hear – it could be a week, three months, six months, even longer – and in some (thankfully rare) cases it’s never. All unavoidable of course: no one’s to blame, though I know from some other comments I’ve read that there are people who do seem to think that the Publishing Industry is in cahoots against them. It’s a situation that at its worst can cause ill feeling on both sides. However, as Mr Gertler points out, no news really is no news.

In fact, it seems that the long wait is a tradition stretching back to publishing’s early days if the case of poet John Clare is anything to go by. According to the splendid biography of Clare by Jonathan Bate, Clare’s second collection of poetry was advertised in November 1820, but did not appear until September 1821. Understandably, Clare found the waiting difficult. In his case it wasn’t helped by a friend who helpfully told him that his London publishers, John Taylor and James Hessey, “had been sitting on a set of proofs for a month, without bothering to send them to Clare”.

Another helpful friend told John Taylor in August 1820 that the poet was so upset by the delay he had taken up drinking again. Taylor was hurt. He had a heavy workload and his own health problems, on top of which Clare’s work was a struggle to edit because of his poor handwriting, spelling and grammar. The publisher wrote to the poet: “I had thought you felt more Regard for me than to plunge into old Excesses and lay the Sin at my Door.” Then, Bate tells us, “Clare, in turn, was upset at the accusation that he had been complaining about Taylor. He would sooner the volumes were delayed till the Christmas after next than have anyone other than Taylor himself do the editing”.

Clearly, it was a difficult situation for both Clare and Taylor, exacerbated by the facts that the economy was in recession, and the bottom had dropped out of the poetry market. That sounds familiar too. Perhaps, despite the huge differences between publishing then and now, the basics haven’t changed all that much. Authors still get anxious over delays and publishers and agents still get exasperated at their lack of commercial sense. At least we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we are part of a great literary heritage - while being careful of course not to blame agents and publishers for driving us to drink!

Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room –the blog has lots of other interesting and entertaining articles for authors - http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/

John Clare: A Biography, by Jonathan Bate, is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Picador – and it’s a fantastic read.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.